Can't Be Satisfied (53 page)
Read Can't Be Satisfied Online
Authors: Robert Gordon
54
“We did the very first show”: Harvey, “Growing Up with the Blues.”
54
Sonny Boy II: Rice Miller never waxed a record until John Lee Williamson was six feet under God’s brown earth. (He did claim to
have recorded in 1929, but the song has never been found.)
In Mississippi, Tom Freeland introduced me to Carl Dugger, an octogenarian from northwest Arkansas. “Out here in the country, we used to walk about eight miles to see Sonny Boy,”
Dugger remembered. “Had to pay a nickel to go in. This was back in the nineteen thirties. He had seven or eight harps around his belt, he could put two harps in his mouth at the same time.
They put Sonny Boy in jail in the town of Sardis, him and his partner. They played inside all night, let ’em out the next morning, carried them down to a little one-room café. They
played around, took up money with a hat, and went on to other places.”
Lockwood and Williamson’s ramblings affected the radio show. “We set some good speed records getting back to the ferry,” Robert Lockwood Jr. told
Living Blues.
“Sometimes Captain Johnson would wait on us if he knew we were coming, but we missed it a few times and had to sleep in the car until six or seven o’clock before he started
again.” (Harvey, “Growing Up.”) KFFA announcers have said they were often concerned they’d give the cue for King Biscuit Time and nothing would happen.
55
“He’d [announce] every spot”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
56
“Sr. Eduardo”: Lomax field notes, Lomax Archives. Further described as “the keen dapper Brazilian sociology
student.”
57
“How it come about that [Robert Johnson] played Lemon’s style”: Lomax,
Land,
pp. 16–17.
57
“General Musical Questionnaire”: This document is on file at the Library of Congress, as is an interesting forerunner. In
September of 1941, Lewis Jones made a list of the songs on five jukeboxes in Clarksdale, giving a great sample
of what was popular at the time and what was familiar to Muddy;
that list is most easily accessible in Tony Russell’s “Clarksdale Piccolo Blues.” Russell notes that the list is overwhelmingly urban. One-fifth of the titles are blues, only two
of which are country blues; the remainder of the songs are big bandish and swing. Interestingly, Louis Jordan, Count Basie, and Fats Waller were found on all five jukeboxes.
61
“how long to make twenty dollars”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
p. 235.
61
“I carried that record up the corner”: Palmer, “The Delta Sun.”
The mistaken belief that Muddy had his own jukebox may stem from this quote in the O’Neal and van Singel
Living Blues
interview: “I taken one [record] and put it on my
jukebox.” (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”) “My” jukebox does not refer to one in his home, where, without electricity, it would be useful only as a
table, but rather to the jukebox Muddy favored, which was down the road toward Farrell — “before the hill,” according to Magnolia Hunter. That’s where he put his copy of the
Library of Congress recording, about which he told
Living Blues,
“I’d slip and play it, you know — I didn’t want ’em to see me.”
62
“an old cotton picker was asked whether or not the people sang”: Adams, Manuscript, Lomax Archives, p. 51.
62
The machine was ready to take the jobs of men: Agribusiness boomed in the early 1930s. According to Smithsonian historian Pete Daniel,
the USDA was excited by the decline of small farmers’ fortunes, because that cleared the way for the larger farmers to absorb them and to more efficiently use the burgeoning mechanized
equipment. Federal policies combined with science and technology to expedite agribusiness. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to plow up portions of their crop and evolved
into payment to landowners for not planting, further eradicated the need for field hands. (See Daniel,
Lost Revolutions
.)
63
“two different repertoires”: This quote comes from Lewis Jones’s “The Mississippi Delta”; however, there
are sections of Jones’s manuscript that include, verbatim, John Work’s handwritten notes. So I’m surmising that this is Work’s information from his 1943 trip, when he took
the picture.
64
“I was doing the same thing”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
64
a suit of clothes and an acoustic Sears Silvertone guitar: Hollie I. West,
Washington Post,
September 24, 1971, Sec. B.
5: C
ITY
B
LUES
1943–1946
Arriving in Chicago:
Muddy came north on the Illinois Central Railroad. That link to the North had been established in 1858 as a freight and passenger steamboat line. By 1885 it
ran as a railroad from Jackson, Tennessee, to New Orleans. The rail line shifted Mississippi’s development from towns along the river to those along the railway. Clarksdale, previously a
nothing town, assumed prominence over Friars Point, which had once been the most important port for trade and travel. The Illinois Central Railroad directly linked the Delta to its terminus in
Chicago, connecting the Mississippi farms to the Great Lakes shipping industry. (See Corliss,
Main Line of Mid-America
.)
Reverend Willie Morganfield, who visited his cousin frequently, said about Chicago, “Chicago, you don’t play in Chicago. You have to be very cautious there. But I walked the street,
went where I wanted to go, because I know a little about Chicago.” A. J. Liebling, writer for
The New Yorker,
spent several months in the city in 1951, and he also learned a little
about Chicago, noting the inverse pride citizens had in how bad things were, whether it was civic corruption or the weather. “The contemplation of municipal corruption,” he wrote,
“is always gratifying to Chicagoans. They are helpless to do anything about it, but they like to know it is on a big scale.” (Dedmon,
Fabulous Chicago,
p. 347.)
Entering the Chicago Music Scene:
When Muddy arrived in Chicago, the recording industry was crippled by more than the Petrillo ban. Charlie Gillett, in
The Sound of the
City
(p. 8), notes: “In April of 1942, the War Production Board had ordered a 79 percent reduction in the nonmilitary use of shellac and implemented a regulation which required the
exchange of old records for every one purchased. To survive the shortage, the six major record companies, Columbia, Victor, Mercury, Decca, Capitol, and MGM, concentrated almost exclusively on the
predominantly white popular music market.” (See also Gelatt,
The Fabulous Phonograph:
1877–1977
.)
When Muddy eventually found club gigs, the money was not extraordinary. According to contracts discovered by Jim O’Neal dating between 1942 and 1944, Memphis Slim and Big Bill Broonzy were
paid seven dollars and seventy-five cents each for midnight shows at the Indiana Theater. The pair split thirty dollars for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights for four months at Ruby’s
Tavern, and Slim alone, for five nights a week at Rudy’s Chicken Palace, took home thirty-six dollars a week. Broonzy was prominent at the time. Jimmy Rogers said about him: “I really
admired him, hair stand on my head to see that man. Big Bill gave me a lot of points on what was going down in this blues field.” (Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.) Muddy told McKee and
Chisenhall that he met Broonzy in 1944, the same year he met Memphis Slim, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Boy I, and Lee Brown. “I played with Lee Brown after ‘Bobbie Town
Boogie’ came out,” Muddy told O’Neal and van Singel. “It was sellin’ pretty good, but it wasn’t sellin’ much as he played it. He did ‘Bobbie Town
Boogie’ four times a night! It wasn’t but just him and [guitarist] Baby Face Leroy and me. That’s where I met Baby Face Leroy. We didn’t even have a drum, not the biggest
part of the time. Lee Brown introduced me to a record agent, Mayo Williams.” Williams got Muddy on his first Chicago session.
Muddy’s early repertoire included two Big Joe Turner hits, 1940’s “Piney Brown Blues” and the next year’s “Corrine, Corrina.” (Muddy recorded his own
version of the latter on his
Woodstock
album.) His voice, though gruffer than Turner’s, was as big, and both were declamatory. The slow drag of Turner’s “Piney Brown
Blues” suited Muddy’s mercurial manner; it was a staple of his repertoire around the Delta and a favorite for his audience when he got to Chicago. He told
Living Blues,
“I used to sing good ‘Piney Brown.’ ‘I been to Kansas City, everything is really all right.’ I used to drown that, man, I used to put that in water and drown
it.” (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”) He may have been singing that song the night that Calvin Jones stumbled onto him in Chicago at the Boogie Woogie
Inn, Roosevelt and Paulina. Calvin remembered the harp player was not Walter and not Jimmy. Muddy told O’Neal and van Singel, “Little Johnnie Jones used to play harp with me too, the
piano player.” Muddy and Johnny (on piano) later recorded together for Aristocrat.
Stories about the formation of the early band abound. In addition to the account at the end of Chapter 5, the following elements of evolution also seem credible. Muddy told Charles Murray,
“Then Blue Smitty left us and Jimmy got a job, and this left me by myself. I got a guy named Baby Face Leroy. He played drums and guitar, but he and I was playing git-tars together.”
(Murray,
Shots,
p. 184.) He told Bill Dahl in the
Illinois Entertainer,
“Me and Baby Face Leroy started to playing. He played guitar. We said, ‘Hey! We need another
piece.’ And we went and found Walter and got him to come with us. Then Jimmy Rogers came back to the band. That made four of us.” (Bill Dahl, “Muddy Waters Reigns As King,”
Illinois Entertainer,
May 1981.)
Jimmy elaborated on his business relationship with Muddy in the early days: “Muddy as a boss,” Jimmy told Paul Trynka, “we got along real good. Only thing he was short on was
asking people for money. And Muddy was a kind of shy guy of big cities — he wouldn’t get around too much. He’d talk to people if they talked to him, he’d go to work, come
home, and that was it. Chicago to me was just another big city. I’d been around Memphis and places, and I knew you had to stay on your toes and watch the people you associate with.”
(Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.)
When Muddy met Lester Melrose, for whom he cut his second Chicago sessions, Melrose was at the end of a long run of success. He’d entered the music business selling instruments, sheet
music, and records, but soon grasped that the money was in publishing. By developing connections with performers, he became a talent scout and record producer, his control of the sessions
furthering his publishing interests. Over time, with one man overseeing so much of the recording, his sound developed a certain sameness. The scene was changing around him, in front of him, but he
was too entrenched in the old sounds to see it. (See Koester, “Melrose.”)
67
“I was thinking to myself”: Welding, “An Interview.”
67
“The Great Northern Drive”: The editorial ran on October 7, 1916, cited in Drake and Cayton’s
Black
Metropolis,
p. 134. The statistical information comes from Rowe,
Chicago Blues.
67
“I went straight to Chicago”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
68
“If there was no one to meet [the arriving passengers]”: Spear,
Black Chicago,
p. 147. This quote is also cited in
Mike Rowe’s
Chicago Blues.
69
“I had some people there”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
p. 236; McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy
Waters.
69
“the heaviest jive you ever saw in your life”: Rooney,
Bossmen,
p. 109.
69
“Work there eight hours a day”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
p. 236.
69
“During the last war”: Drake and Cayton,
Black Metropolis,
p. 91.
69
“I never did go get good jobs”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
p. 237.
69
“I got a job at the paper mill”: Oliver,
Conversation.
70
“tell this man at the [draft] board”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
pp. 236–237.
70
“The blues Waters found”: Welding, “American Original.”
70
“The vigorous, country-based blues”: Welding, “Afro Mud.”
71
“My blues still was the sad, old-time blues”: Welding, “An Interview.”
71
“You’d go in”: Rooney,
Bossmen,
p. 110.
71
“I played mostly on weekends”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
p. 237; McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy
Waters.
72
Dan Jones: His address was 1857 West Thirteenth Street.
72
“I call my style country style”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
73
“You done made hits”: McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale,
p. 237.
73
“she was a Christian-type woman”: O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers,” p. 11.
74
“They was men then”: Ibid.
Rogers remembers meeting and playing with Sonny Boy II, but places it around 1939 or 1940. He attributes the radio show, however, as his reason for seeking him, so it must have been after
November 1941.
